Christy Clark’s B.C. Liberals were on their way to Tuesday night’s victory party long ago, heeding the advice of strategists from the Ontario and Alberta elections to lay out a positive vision and a plan of attack well before the election, then stick to it. Both the jobs plan and campaign against the NDP were in place by the fall of 2012.

VICTORIA -- Looking back on a campaign that began with leadership change in the main parties two years ago, what proved to be the winning strategy was anticipated in a briefing delivered at the New Democratic Party convention in late 2011.

The speaker was Michael Balagus, political strategist for the NDP government in Manitoba, then fresh from having secured a fourth term of office.

He talked about reaching out to people who don’t follow politics because they are too busy with their own lives. Discovering their concerns.

Then defining a campaign that would motivate them to “get off the couch” and vote for your party and/or against the other party.

But the part of the briefing with particular relevance to B.C. was his discussion of how his opinion-poll trailing government rose to the challenge of getting re-elected against an Opposition preaching “time for a change.”

“We redefined change as risk,” said Balagus.

The effort started well before the election, with advertisements that targeted the would-be agents of change, Opposition leader Hugh McFadyen and his Progressive Conservatives, over their record in government in the 1990s, defining them in negative terms before they could define themselves.

“Relentless,” was the way Balagus described his party’s plan of attack. The ruthlessness generated a backlash inside a party that prides itself (however justifiably) on its high-mindedness. But as Balagus observed, a party cannot afford to play the boy scout when fighting for its life.

“We need to get (the message) out,” he said. “If we don’t believe there’s a difference, if we don’t tell people there’s a difference, they’re not going to get it. People vote for something; they also vote against something.”

Sound familiar? Some B.C. New Democrats surely thought so. They also recognized that the circumstances in Manitoba were reversed here, so far as New Democrats were concerned.

There the party was battling “time-for-a-change” to retain office. Here the party was touting the slogan as a way of gaining office. That, in turn, meant that the winning strategy described by Balagus could be turned against the party in B.C.

“We don’t want you going to the Liberals and giving them any hints on how to define us,” as one B.C. MLA put it, only half jokingly. As she spoke, a Liberal staffer was furiously taking notes on everything Balagus said from a post in the observer’s gallery at the back of the convention hall.

The Liberals’ successful drive for a fourth term here in B.C. included defining change as scary, the NDP as a party that could not be trusted based on its record in government, and the leader as “Risky Dix.”

Not to say that the inspiration came from directly from the Balagus briefing. Only that the New Democrats did not appear to have absorbed the lessons of what happened in Manitoba half as well as the Liberals.

Fast forward one year to the B.C. Liberals’ own convention in the fall of 2012. Again, delegates heard a briefing from out-of-province strategists who’d recently been involved in re-election bids in their respective provinces.

Don Guy hailed from Ontario, where that province’s Liberal government had fought its way back from a huge deficit in the opinion polls to come within one seat of a majority. Stephen Carter was behind the Progressive Conservatives’ big win in Alberta, then (though no longer) the outstanding example of a government making a mockery of professional prognosticators en route to re-election.

The duo spoke to delegates in private but some of what they had to say leaked out, via a combination of up-to-the-moment social media and old-fashioned eavesdropping.

The most widely cited line was Carter’s characterization of pollsters, pundits and political scientists as the “holy trinity” of know-nothings.

But there was also an emphasis on the volatile nature of the electorate in these increasingly uncertain times. Many voters don’t pay attention to politics between elections. Many don’t make up their minds until a week or two before the election. Some decide as they are marking their ballots.

How do we know these things? Thanks to those same opinion polls that the delegates were advised to discount, except when they should not do so.

Overall, the strategists reiterated the importance of laying out both a positive vision and a plan of attack well before the election, then sticking to it. One thinks of the Liberal jobs plan and the campaign against the NDP, both already in place in the fall of 2012, both decisive in the election.

None of those observations were all that dramatic or unprecedented. Still, for those of us in the hindsight division of the news media — a much easier pursuit than the crystal ball side of the business — the Liberals would appear to have absorbed the available lessons from Ontario and Alberta far better than the New Democrats.

Indeed with the big win in B.C., the strategists behind Liberal Campaign 2013 — they include Mike McDonald, Don Millar, Patrick Kinsella, Dimitri Pantazopoulos and the aforementioned Don Guy — must have established themselves as the new turnaround experts in Canadian politics.

Presumably they’ll be called on to lend advice and provide inspiration next time a government is in trouble and headed for an election.

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